1. Field
The invention disclosed and claimed herein generally pertains to a method and system for automatically assessing the Terms of Service (ToS) associated with one or more API providers. More particularly, the invention pertains to a method and system of the above type for enabling an API consumer, or other user that has its own required ToS, to readily determine the differences between its own required ToS and the ToS of respective API providers.
2. Description of the Related Art
When an application is developed, the developer may need to use one or more Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), in order to gain access to one or more respectively related services. This can cause the developer or other API consumer to go to an API marketplace to locate API providers who can supply the needed APIs. However, each API provider will generally have its own ToS, and the API consumer may also require its own ToS. Accordingly, the API consumer must compare its own ToS requirements with the ToS of each API provider the consumer is considering, in order to determine the acceptability of each provider ToS. API consumers may have different ToS requirements depending on the type of the application they seek to develop (or type APIs they seek to use). Similarly, a freelance application developer and an application developer, who is part of a large development team at an enterprise may have different ToS requirements, resulting in a demand for ToS profiles.
At present, there are no systems for automatically and systematically assessing ToS amongst multiple providers, who can each supply the same type of API. As a result, comparisons of such ToS generally require a human intensive process. For a given ToS required by an API consumer, someone representing the API consumer must manually extract respective terms of an API provider ToS, and then compare each extracted term with a corresponding term of the consumer ToS. Tasks of this type typically are quite tedious and time-consuming. Moreover, persons carrying out the tasks may need to have a substantial amount of specialized knowledge of some type. If the API consumer requires a composite set, or pattern, of APIs, the above task can be even more difficult and challenging.